10.09.2013

Now, don’t get me wrong. I was at least three or four of the
following things: blown away by the technical achievement, on the edge of my
seat for the whole ninety minutes, deeply thankful that someone seemed to be
making every effort at realism, forgetting I was watching a Sandra Bullock
vehicle, wishing I had one of those EVA jetpacks, instinctively dodging the
best 3-D shrapnel I’ve ever seen.

Here's the trailer, for those who haven't seen...

But still, Gravity sucked.

I’ll explain. First, let me add the obligatory ***Spoiler
Alert***. Although, in truth, there’s little to spoil. The premise of the movie
explains the entire plot: Astronauts face the dangers of physics and the harsh
realities of space during a “space junk” disaster in low Earth orbit. You can
pretty much thread out the disaster movie tropes from there. Which leads me to
my first complaint:

Gravity is not a
movie. It’s an experience. If anything, it’s a theme park ride relocated to
your local multiplex. In fact, if the Universal Studios people aren’t
frantically designing a Gravity! ride (ála EPCOT’s Mission:Space starring Gary Sinise) then they’re missing a serious
opportunity. Theme park attractions like these make every attempt to be
immersive: You’re the astronaut, you’re the subject of the experiment, you’ve
been called on to solve the mystery/fight the battle/brave the trial. Gravity was nothing if not immersive,
partly due to the amazing cinematography and sound design, but also because the
main character was a near blank, easy to imprint one’s own perceptions upon.
She had a shallow backstory (that I couldn’t help but think might have
disqualified her to be an astronaut based on a psychological evaluation) and an
even shallower character arc. In the end her arc mattered little; it’s really
your arc that matters in this experience. Does this really make a movie? Like
any other good theme park attraction, it left me temporarily breathless, but
ultimately looking for the next ride.

My first comment as I left the theater was, “The most
unbelievable part of the whole movie was that the U.S. was still flying the
space shuttle.” Ha ha ha. But overall, Gravity’s
portrayal of the American space program left a sour taste in my mouth. At the
beginning of the movie, I thought, “Awesome, we’re still flying. USA. USA. USA.”
But the details began to bug me. What were the Americans doing up there? Swapping
video cards on the Hubble? (And when, of course, it doesn’t boot up, they
resort to blowing the dust off the circuit boards like some greasy Geek Squad
counter jockey. Right.) Testing a new hyperactive EVA jetpack and aching to
one-up the Russians? Showing off their witty, but multi-cultural,
multi-gendered crew? The whole setup was filled with the reasons people hate
the space program in general and manned space missions in particular. The
public hates failures, from minor technical snafus to major crew loss
disasters; propaganda stunts, from quiet nods to diversity to broad
geopolitical hat-waving; and tax dollars spent on any of it, from cowboy
showboating to incremental and arcane scientific achievements. It was all there
on the screen, enough to stoke the anti-space exploration argument for years.
Why spend so much money, risk so many people, and expend so much effort on
something as tenuous as a nearly useless foothold in LEO, when the masses
have such big problems here on Earth?

The answer to that is that our foothold on our own planet is
just as tenuous—which brings me to my last point. The broader takeaway message of
Gravity, in my opinion, was supposed
to be one of hope: Life on Earth is fragile and unsuited to survive in much of
the universe, but it is precious and unique. And like the first creatures to
struggle out of the sea onto dry land (to use the movie’s own crude
evolutionary metaphor) we are experiencing our first gasping pains on the new
shoals of outer space. We will face difficulties, and some will not survive,
but what we learn from these mistakes paves the way for the future. At least I’d
like to think that’s the message of the movie.

However I fear that the message will be misread by
casual viewers. Gravity can easily be
seen as an anti-space program screed. Viewed a certain way, it posits the
certain eventuality of such a disaster as a warning, and suggests that these
fragile monuments to nationalism (the space shuttles and space stations) aren’t
worth the effort. Mother Earth is our beautiful home, it exclaims; that’s where
we evolved, and that’s where we should stay. You ain’t never gettin’ me up in
one of those deathtraps! But this is a short-term view of our species, life in
general on our planet, and our place in the universe.

Our planet may seem enormous and comforting, but it is no
less an object in space, enslaved by physics, than the least free-floating
suited astronaut. In time it will cook in radiation and burn up on reentry into
the surface of its unforgiving star. On its surface, we exist in a razor-thin
layer that at any moment could be choked to death by a supervolcano or an
asteroid. But not content to wait, we’re almost wantonly destroying the layer on
our own. So what will we choose? To ride it out, Slim Pickens style,

on our
planet to the end. Or can we agree that if we want our children to survive, we
need overcome our doubts and develop space technologies that take our
ecosystems into space, to other planets, and hopefully, someday to other stars?

Did Gravity excite
me to do that? No, and I’m pro-space. That is why Gravity sucked. I worry that it will leave too many in fear,
certain that the problems are insurmountable, and in the end, not really
caring, just looking for the next ride.

Yes, it's true...

I quit a perfectly good job to devote my life to writing science fiction. I'm a former convention center manager, and once upon a time graduated from film school. My first novel Rhubarb was released in April, 2012. I can be contacted at mhvankeuren@gmail.com.